PMCID: PMC9008579. SLEEP AND ITS UTILITY FOR MENTAL HEALTH AND WELL-BEING RESEARCH: THE CASE FOR LONGITUDINAL MEASUREMENTS

While extensive literature supports a bidirectional relationship between sleep and mental health, the temporal nature of this relationship remains unclear. Understanding this relationship is essential for characterizing sleep’s role in psychiatric disease risk, symptom severity, and potential use as a biomarker and mediator of pharmacologic treatment response. With the increasing popularity and accessibility of wearable technologies, specifically smartwatches, the collection of long-term sleep data has become possible across a variety of psychiatric and wellness conditions, including major depressive disorder, bipolar disorder, and occupational burnout. Despite a broad consensus regarding the relationship between sleep health and psychiatric outcomes, findings across wearable studies have varied. Differences in measurement approaches, study design, and feature engineering of sleep metrics have contributed to this inconsistency. In this presentation, the range of metrics and engineered sleep features that can be derived from smartwatches will be examined with an emphasis on metrics collected from longitudinal studies. Relevant literature and new findings on smartwatch-collected sleep metrics correlated with major depressive disorder and occupational burnout will be discussed. Examining wearable-derived sleep features and how these features relate to psychiatric outcomes is crucial for advancing the utility of longitudinal sleep monitoring for psychiatric research.

References

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